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Let’s Talk about America’s Strategic Choices

Foreign policy has certainly featured heavily in this election
season, but there has been little true debate on the future
direction of America’s global role. Though Hillary Clinton
advocates increased global commitment,
polls show thatonly a minority of Americans (27 percent)
believe that the United States does too little globally, while 41
percent of Americans think the United States does too much around
the world. Donald Trump may have benefited from this popular
dissatisfaction with the state of U.S. foreign policy, but his own
wild pronouncements are lacking in substance or even basic common
sense. This election is unlikely to provide the robust debate on
America’s foreign policy choices so urgently needed.

Worse yet, that lack of debate is not new: Policymakers and
political candidates typically embrace the status quo in foreign
policy. Among these elites, there is solid bipartisan support for
extensive alliance commitments, frequent military intervention, and
higher defense spending. Debates tend to focus on which
specific actions the United States should take, only rarely asking
whether the United States should be involved, militarily
or otherwise, in various global crises.

Certainly, there is also bipartisan opposition to this
consensus: They may differ on domestic issues, but there are more
similarities than differences between the restrained foreign policy
approaches of Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately, this
opposition is weaker politically than either the internationalist
consensus, or the uglier nativist impulses that have propelled
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

America cannot simply
rely on the business-as-usual foreign policies that have sustained
it in recent years.

Even President Barack Obama, elected in large part thanks to his
repudiation of the Bush administration’s conduct of foreign policy,
has failed to alter the underlying bipartisan consensus. Many
inside the Beltway believe that America remains the “indispensable
nation” whose leadership is required in perpetuity.

Yet as the president has discovered, America’s “unipolar moment”
is waning. As he told
Jeffrey Goldberg in April 2016: “Almost every great world power
has succumbed” to overextension. He continued, “What I think is not
smart is the idea that every time there is a problem, we send in
our military to impose order. We just can’t do that.”

U.S. influence in the world remains preeminent, but with a
rising China, a reassertive Russia, and emerging regional
rivalries, that preeminence is no longer unchallenged. America
cannot simply rely on the business-as-usual foreign policies that
have sustained it in recent years. Instead, the country must look
to alternative approaches to foreign policy, many of which are
better suited to dealing with the complexities of the 21st
century.

Today, we launch a series of articles challenging that
bipartisan foreign policy consensus and presenting alternative
proposals based upon a
grand strategy of restraint, which emphasizes that
America’s global influence is strongest when spread by peaceful
— rather than military — means. In contrast to our
current grand strategy (known as primacy or liberal hegemony),
which demands a massive, forward-deployed military, a strategy of
restraint focuses on avoiding distant conflicts that do not
threaten American interests, thereby conserving American power and
security. Restraint argues that the U.S. military should be used
rarely and only for clearly defined reasons.

Over the next six weeks, articles in this series — adapted
from the recent Cato Institute publication Our Foreign Policy Choices: Rethinking America’s Global
Role — will explore the problems with our current
grand strategy and the prospects for a more restrained foreign
policy. The series will propose in broad strokes how a more
restrained foreign policy could be implemented in areas such as
U.S.-China relations, America’s global alliances, and our approach
to fighting terrorism. In some cases, our authors advocate a
continuation of current policies or relatively minor course
corrections, whereas in others they suggest more radical
reformulations of U.S. foreign policy. Each article provides an
alternate way to view today’s foreign policy problems, expanding
the scope of the long-overdue debate on America’s foreign policy
future.

The United States is the richest, most secure, and most powerful
country in the world; the range of possible choices available to
policymakers is extremely broad. That doesn’t mean, however, that
we can avoid choosing or that those choices will be easy. In the
long term, the lack of debate on foreign policy will damage
American interests by precluding serious consideration of our
options. It will blind us to the changes taking place in the world
today and will prevent us from capitalizing on new opportunities to
advance U.S. security and prosperity.

This article is the first in a series, “Course Correction”, in a collaboration with
War On The Rocks. The
articles in this series challenge the existing bipartisan foreign
policy consensus and offer a different path.